General info and comments

GOLD! The excitement is great and many are coming to claim the precious metal for themselves. All accounts will be settled at the end.

Contents

16 wooden gold pieces

8 new land tiles with gold symbol

1 new land tile with crop circle

Rules

Preparation

The landscape tiles with the gold symbol are mixed with the other landscape tiles. The gold pieces are kept available for use.

This expansion has been developed for the Carcassonne basic game. All of the rules remain the same.

Placing a tile

When a player draws a tile with a gold symbol, he or she plays it according to normal rules. Then the player must put a piece of gold on both the placed tile and one adjacent tile (diagonal is allowed). Thus, 2 gold pieces are placed for each gold tile played. A player is allowed to put a piece of gold on a tile that already has one or more gold pieces from a previously placed landscape tile. A piece of gold is never associated with a particular feature, but always applies to all features on a tile.

Placing a meeple

After gold placement, the player may still place a follower according to the normal rules.

Scoring a feature

If the tile with the gold symbol completes a feature after placing the tile, the feature is scored as usual.

Additionally, when a feature is finished and there are one or more pieces of gold on the tiles of that structure, these gold pieces are awarded. The player with the majority of the completed structure receives all gold pieces from the corresponding tiles. A road and a city include all tiles on which road segments or city segments are located. A cloister includes the cloister tile itself and all 8 adjacent tiles. [1]

BLUE places a tile with a gold icon. He places a gold piece on that tile and one on a neighboring tile.

RED completes his city and takes the three gold pieces from the city tiles.

When placing a tile and distributing gold pieces, proceed in the following order:

Place (gold) tile

Place gold pieces

Place follower

Score

Award gold pieces

When more than one player has the majority in a finished structure when gold is to be claimed, or when several structures with a claim to gold are completed at the same time, the gold pieces are distributed among those claiming players. Distribution proceeds clockwise, starting with the active player, until all of the corresponding gold pieces have been awarded. [2][3]

RED placed the tile and completed the road. RED and BLUE have rights to the gold on the road tiles. As active player RED takes first gold, then BLUE, and finally RED last.

Each player places his gold pieces before him for the remainder of the game. The gold pieces will be scored during the final scoring.

Farmers receive no gold pieces.

Final scoring

When the game is over, all gold pieces which are still on landscape tiles are removed from the game.

The more gold pieces a player has collected, the more each individual piece of gold is worth, as per the following table

Pieces of gold

Points per piece of gold

1-3

1

4-6

2

7-9

3

10+

4

Final Scoring Example:[4]RED earned 102 points and 7 pieces of gold in the game.
The gold is worth 7 x 3 = 21 points.
The final score for RED is 123 points.

The crop circles addition

In each mini, you will find a tile of the 7th mini expansion Crop Circles. This expansion is playable with only a single tile, but it is best to play with all 6 tiles. [5]

Tile Distribution

Total Tiles: 9 (8 + 1 crop circle)

x1

x1

x1

x1

x1

x1

x1

x1

x1

Footnotes

↑ When a castle is completed, the owner can lay claim to gold pieces in the 6-tile vicinity of the castle: the 2 tiles upon which the castle is built, the 2 tiles to its left, and the 2 tiles to its right. The owner of the castle does not necessarily have the rights to gold associated with the feature that caused completion of the castle (unless that gold is also within the castle's vicinity or the castle owner
also has a majority in the primary feature). (6/2013)

↑ The active player (if entitled to gold) chooses the first gold piece and can choose any one of the pieces to which he/she may be entitled. The next player (in clockwise order) that is entitled to a gold piece can then choose an appropriate piece. Note that, because a player can choose which piece to take first (if there is more than one to choose from), a different player who may have initially been entitled to a gold piece may miss out if that piece has been claimed before it is that player's turn to choose. (6/2013)

↑ The RGG version of the rules states "players who score completed features with gold bars take one gold bar for each feature they score and that has gold bars." This seems different from the HiG rules, where the rule is to only take one gold piece at a time.

↑ This additional rules clarification is from the Big Box 4 edition of the rules.

↑ Note that the Crop Circle tiles included in the mini expansions are different from the tiles released in the initial Crop Circles expansion (referred to as "Crop Circles I").